Heroes of the Storm Artifacts are being removed from the game

Posted By: Paul YoungerAugust 1, 2014

Blizzard has listened to the Heroes of the Storm community and decided the new systems are not working.

Saying the community was less than impressed with Blizzard’s Artifacts system would be an understatement. The Artifacts appeared in the Alpha test during the last patch but it appears they’re just not working. In a new post, Blizzard has confirmed that Artifacts are now being removed from the game.

Artifacts were designed to provide you with a meaningful way to spend gold, while also providing additional options to customize your heroes. We wanted to test artifacts in the Alpha to find out if the system fulfilled those goals. As testing began, many of you voiced concerns around fairness issues, “correct build” issues, balance, new player tension, and other issues that made it clear that artifacts weren’t working as intended. We agree—those issues started to outweigh the benefits of the system.

As a result, we have decided to remove the artifact system from Heroes of the Storm with a patch scheduled for later today. We will explore different ways to give you fun and compelling options for spending gold, while avoiding the problems that the initial artifact system created. We don’t have any updates on what our future systems may be, but we’ll be sure to keep you informed and look forward to getting your feedback on alternate systems.

A new system to unlock Heroes talents was also introduced but it has been frustrating for players to level up, so Blizzard has tweaked the system. They’ve now sped up the process, saying that “unlocking all talents on a hero can be done in as few as three games with friends in versus mode”. Blizzard want to ease players into the game by unlocking talents gradually, so this change today is a middle-ground solution.

With the Artifacts gone, Blizzard are now looking for feedback for some kind of alternative system as it sounds like they have no current plans on what to replace it with.

At least today’s news is good news for the community. Blizzard appear to be listening.